


Event Horizon

by Fossarian



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Crait (Star Wars), M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-08
Updated: 2018-03-08
Packaged: 2019-03-28 11:04:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,480
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13902690
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fossarian/pseuds/Fossarian
Summary: Hux has a conversation with Kylo after Crait.





	Event Horizon

Wanting to minimize as many casualties as possible, Hux directs no one to speak to Kylo after the battle on Crait until he gives the all-clear. The men say “yes, sir” with more enthusiasm for a task than he’s ever seen and quickly leave.

Hux sighs. At least that’s taken care of.

The one good thing about Kylo is that he doesn’t usually go around _seeking_ out conflict. It tends to find him. Hux is fairly sure the only person to cross paths with Kylo Ren and live to tell about it is that Jakku girl who’s gotten his head all turned around. You’d think he’d never seen a woman before.

Hux closes his eyes and rubs his brow. He knows it’s more complicated than that. Because it _always_ is with Kylo. Nothing can ever just be the way it looks. Hell, if it were just about working off a little steam Hux is willing to bet there’s plenty of girls - or boys - who’d volunteer for the job. It’s not as if Kylo’s problem has ever been attracting admirers.

But it’s not that simple. It never is.

Like what they all just saw out there with his uncle. Hux hadn’t even known the man was still alive, let alone in fighting condition. Or whatever you call it when you astral project yourself onto another planet purely for the benefit of tipping your unstable nephew over the deep end.

Enough stalling, Hux tells himself. He isn’t Force-sensitive but even he can imagine how angry Kylo is on the other side of the door. He’s never seen anything like what just happened. Nobody has.

He’s seen Kylo lose control. He’s seen him angry, he’s seen him in pain. Hux has never seen him like this, so absolutely out of it that nothing seemed to matter anymore, not even his own well-being.

Hux would like to follow the other men out of the room and pretend this whole thing hadn’t happened. Maybe fix himself a stiff drink or five.

But he’s the General. His people look up to him. He’s second-in-command. And most importantly, who else is going to do it?

Hux knocks on the door but, predictably, there’s no answer, so he just enters the code and walks in. If Kylo’s in a state, he’s not going to care about the niceties of decorum. Hux glances around the room, mentally preparing himself for the sight of melted metal, fractured composite parts, and the smell of burning plastic. He half-expects the last image of his life to be the red flare of a lightsaber coming towards his face.

But what he finds is much scarier than that.

Nothing is destroyed. The room is exactly as Hux had left it hours before.

Kylo is just sitting in the dark at the command chair, almost negligently, one long leg stretched out in front of him, the other slightly bent at the knee. His saber rests loosely on his thigh, turned off. Hux can’t quite see his face because of all that hair, but there’s a stillness about Kylo that is eerie, almost deathlike.

Hux slowly walks around to stand in front of him. All the words he’d intended to berate Kylo with die on his lips. When he’d entered the room, he’d fully intended to speak his mind. If he’s going to die, it’s going to be telling the truth.

But now it just… doesn’t seem necessary.

Kylo doesn’t look up at him. He’s staring off at some point on the wall. If it were anyone else, Hux would question if the man was even aware of his presence .

“Well,” Hux coughs into his gloved fist. “That was -”

“Don’t talk,” Kylo says. “I don’t need you to tell me I fucked up.”

Even in moments of distress, Hux can’t quite get used to the surprising softness of Kylo’s real voice. He’s so accustomed to the mechanized version, which adequately conveys sarcasm and contempt, but little else. Kylo’s real voice is almost… pretty.

“I would hope you’d know,” Hux says. He pauses, debates how much of a gambling man he wants to be. Then: “I wasn’t going to say that. Not in quite those words, anyway.”

Hux doesn’t know much about Kylo’s past. About all his information comes from Stormtrooper gossip and the cryptic comment here and there from their deceased Supreme Leader. Quite literally, Kylo just showed up one day, already Snoke’s favorite.

Even Hux had been impressed with his physicality. Hux can appreciate skill, all the more so skill he himself does not possess, and Kylo truly is a master of the Force and of the sword. Hux can see it’s more than just magic, that it’s almost a burden.

It was only later that Hux saw the cracks in the facade. Kylo’s emotional instability, his paranoia. Hux had, somewhat foolishly, hoped that the Supreme Leader’s death would even Kylo out.

When Kylo was training under Snoke, Kylo used to get headaches a lot. Sometimes nosebleeds. Hux remembers one time the bleeding wouldn’t stop and Kylo got very pale, but he wouldn’t go to the medics.

He’d started talking about things that didn’t make any sense, things that had happened to him on Chandrila and later, with his uncle during his Jedi years. Hux can still remember that scene, his mounting alarm and the creepy way Kylo didn’t seem aware of which reality he was in. How young he’d sounded.

Hux had been standing over him much like this, and Kylo had been sitting on a bench in one of the Stormtrooper’s quarters, talking very fast as he continuously wiped at the blood pouring down his face with nary a concern about it. If not for the vast amounts of blood smeared over everything, you’d think he was taking a spot of tea with Hux on the veranda.

 _Don’t get too close, General,_ he’d said in this absurdly conversational tone. _You’ll get dirty. That’s not your job. Everyone knows I’m the one that makes the mess._

He’d only gone to the medbay at all because Hux had reported him to Snoke.

So here they are again. Except this time, there’s no Snoke to save Kylo from himself. Hux feels oddly depressed by this realization. He’d never thought he’d miss that conniving, sadistic old man.

But he had been the only one keeping Kylo from completely losing it.

“You can be any kind of leader you want,” Hux says slowly, carefully. “Is this the kind you have decided on?”

He watches Kylo’s hand twitch around the hilt of his saber. A reflex, it seems, because he makes no further motion to use it. Kylo tears his eyes away from the wall and looks up at him, and Hux is relieved to see that they’re at least clear and focused now, no longer that far-away _goneness_.

Kylo has a way of looking at you like he’s seeing straight into your soul, if you believe in that sort of thing. Which Hux isn’t sure he does. But that feeling remains, of being x-rayed, scanned down to the last cell.

“And you,” Kylo says, leaning back in his chair so that he looks more like a lordling than ever. “What do you want to be?”

He sets his lightsaber on the table and laces his fingers over his stomach, as if to say _entertain me._

“I?” Hux says. He hasn’t thought about it, hasn’t _allowed_ himself to. Working for first one Force-master and now another, that would have been the quickest way to a career change, if not imprisonment or death.

“You think you’d make a better leader of the First Order,” Kylo says. His tone is unreadable, but this is dangerous territory.

Despite how calm he’s being, Hux remains uneasy. It’s not… normal. You can’t go from zero to one-hundred and back again that quickly. Nobody can. Hux doesn’t care how many years you’ve spent meditating.

“I know my capabilities,” Hux says. “And I know yours. I think we’d do better for each other and the Order if we worked together.”

It’s as close to the truth as he can get without just saying, _Yes, I think you’re crazy._

Kylo nods, as if he’d expected this type of answer. “You’re good with words. You’re good at reading people. I’m just good with _this._ ” He gestures to his saber, so innocent-looking as it lays on the table. Just metal and wires and a crystal from some cave.

The real weapon is Kylo.

Snoke understood that.

For a moment, Hux allows himself to imagine what it could really be like. A true partnership. Kylo has the _look_ of a leader, that air of mystique and beauty that people crave in their superiors. He has a kind of strength and Hux has the other kind. And Hux has the patience and ability to deal with the daily but necessary tedium that keeps an empire running. They would be unstoppable.

“I can help you, if you let me,” Hux ventures.

“What’s the alternative? You plan a coup and kill me?” Kylo leans his cheek on one gloved fist. He looks tired. A king already weary of the weight of his crown.

“I have not -”

Kylo waves a hand to silence him. “Don’t lie. And don’t get mad, I didn’t have to look into your mind to see you think the world would be better off without me.” He smiles. “I see those eyes everywhere.”

Before Hux can formulate a reply, Kylo stands up. There’s a fluid grace to him that Hux finds appealing. Probably all those years training for combat. That Kylo is unaware of his powers in this way makes him all the more interesting to Hux, who spends most of his time in the real world where people have normal social interactions. Like, sex.

He wonders if Kylo is a virgin. His eyes widen fractionally as that thought slips past his barricades. Hopes it doesn’t reach the man in question.

It’s harder to keep his true feelings hidden from Kylo than from Snoke. Maybe because Kylo so much more easily infuriates and baffles him. Maybe it’s just that he’s nicer to look at.

But Kylo is also mercifully oblivious and not very egocentric despite all his tantrums, so it doesn’t seem to occur to him that Hux could be thinking about him in any way that isn’t negative.

“I don’t want to know what’s in your mind,” Kylo says. “I just want results. Nothing like what you saw will happen again.”

He sounds so sure.

“I hope so,” Hux says quietly. No one can endure another episode like Crait, not even Kylo.

He watches the other man pace in front of him, his mind racing towards the next step. If Kylo is open to listening to reason then there’s still hope. They can still make this work. Everything he’s done in the last decade won’t be for nothing.

Snoke’s methods might have worked in the short term, but Hux is beginning to think they did more harm than good to Kylo’s mental stability. Killing Snoke hadn’t fixed it. Killing Skywalker hadn’t fixed it. His father’s death… Hux can understand that desire all too well. And it hadn’t fixed it.

But of course, Snoke’s intentions had never been for Kylo to be an effective ruler. He was always supposed to be a pawn.

“Tell me what you want done and I’ll do it,” Hux says. His heart trips a beat at giving up so much of his hand, but he’s analyzed all his options and this is the only one that’s left. Kylo sees everything as all or nothing, and he doesn’t understand anyone who speaks in maybes.

Kylo stops to face him, giving him that look of all-knowing clarity. Strange in a man who can barely interpret facial expressions. But Hux can’t shake the idea that Kylo’s seeing something in him that he isn’t aware of himself. It’s been a long time since someone made him feel that way.

“Just stop me if I can’t stop myself,” Kylo says with a shrug, like it’s nothing. Casually he extends his arm and his lightsaber goes soaring through the air back into his waiting hand. Hux doesn’t even have time to figure out if he should be afraid or not.

“Are you saying I have permission to exert deadly force should I deem it necessary?” Hux says.

Kylo is busy slipping his saber back into his belt and seems bored with the conversation now. “Yeah, that’s what I’m saying.”

And there, Hux sees it, perhaps has been waiting for it. A slight tremor in Kylo’s fingers as he snaps a loose button closed over his strap and secures his lightsaber. It’s there and gone and Hux looks back up at Kylo’s face, but he’d have never guessed, by his expression, that anything was wrong.

He should have known Kylo would ask something of him he isn’t certain he can deliver on.

“You wouldn’t know this,” Kylo says, “but Snoke saved my life after I left my uncle's, um, care. I didn’t have anywhere else to go.” He glances at Hux, as if waiting for judgment, his eyes dark and shiny with exhaustion.

Hux gives a minute twitch of his head. He wants to tell Kylo to forget about the old man. Fuck him, fuck them all. Hux has banished Brendol Hux to the recesses of bad memories, he can tell Kylo how to do it. They’re free now and what does it matter if the bastards were sometimes nice? It always came with a price.

“Well, it’s done,” Hux says. “Skywalker is done, too.”

He means it to be comforting, but that doesn’t seem to be what Kylo is looking for.

“I just need to know you’ll do it,” Kylo says. His eyes get that far away look again Hux doesn’t like. “Sometimes I get tired of fighting both sides, you know?”

Hux doesn’t know. “Maybe you should sleep,” he says.

It’s the wrong thing to say. He knows it because Kylo laughs and actually reaches over and slaps him on the shoulder, like buddies.

“I will do that,” he says. He’s still smiling but there’s no humor in his eyes, just that same cold dark. “You go clean up my mess for me.”

He turns and leaves Hux in that room. It’s only later that Hux realizes that they both must have been thinking about that one time when Kylo was bleeding out all over the ship and he told Hux not to worry, he doesn’t have to clean up Kylo’s messes.

Things have changed, obviously. But Hux comes back to that old question. If he doesn’t do it, who will?

_You’ll get dirty. That’s not your job._

Hux follows Kylo out of the room. He wants to make sure his Supreme Leader gets to wherever he is going safely.


End file.
